Alexis Hauk: Pompeii exhibit a sight to behold

The first and only time I visited the ruins of Pompeii was in 2003, one stop during a summer-long college trip around Italy.

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Posted Oct. 6, 2011 at 12:01 AM
Updated Oct 6, 2011 at 8:32 AM

Posted Oct. 6, 2011 at 12:01 AM
Updated Oct 6, 2011 at 8:32 AM

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The first and only time I visited the ruins of Pompeii was in 2003, one stop during a summer-long college trip around Italy.

Mostly, I noticed the stray dogs. These mangy beasts wandered over to our group, and one even peed on a fresco right in front of me. (Five years later, the Italian government declared a state of emergency for Pompeii, mostly due to the canine scourge, and just last year it began an adoption program for strays).

Needless to say, it was a treat to revisit the historic gems of the doomed ancient city last week, without buying a plane ticket or haggle with the Euro-Dollar exchange rate. In Boston, the Museum of Science's new 13,000-square-foot exhibit, "A Day in Pompeii," in conjunction with "Massachusetts Archaeology Month," lets us visit the 20,000-population city in the state it was in on Aug. 24 in 79 A.D., when Mount Vesuvius erupted for the first time in thousands of years, burying everything within 24 hours.

The exhibit's tag line, "What nature destroyed, it also preserved" rings eerily true. We're not just talking about recovered furniture, although there are plenty of marble and bronze chairs and tables to gaze at. We're talking carbonized food — an oyster, a walnut, beans, bread — and a portable brazier used in cooking that still contains ashes from its last fire.

The exhibit goes to great lengths arguing that our lives aren't so different now from ancient times. They even had fast-food chains (sort of)! I am ashamed (sort of) to admit that the giggling 5-year-old in me was most enthralled by facts like how Pompeiians had to do their laundry by using urine, for the ammonia.

As one educational video explains, with graphics straight out of the '90s computer game "Myst," Pompeiians didn't even necessarily use their own urine for their own clothes. No, there were large pots sitting in the street, into which people could "relieve" themselves (I'm guessing this was mostly a male privilege). The washers would then collect the contents of these jars, stamp on the clothes/liquid, then give it a good rinsin' and hang to dry.

One guy walked away from the screening area muttering, "I'd have left my clothes dirty."

Still, these little details are what make the anthropological legacy of Pompeii so remarkable. That through a wealth of artifacts, we can learn so much of the nitty gritty — for instance, archaeologists could evidently infer where fish were sold in the marketplace, because of tiny scales left along the gazebo's floor.

What the exhibit also makes clear is how legitimately terrifying the eruption — which was so powerful it reduced Mt. Vesuvius in half — must have been to witness and live through. Although the eruption began at 1 p.m., the majority who perished in Pompeii didn't die until 7:30 a.m. the next day. In many cases, because the city's inhabitants had no idea how bad the explosion would turn out until it was too late to escape. Suddenly, there were pieces of pumice, a type of volcanic rock that is highly pressurized and super-heated, hurtling on peoples' houses in 15-to-20-inch chunks. And the sky was dark.

Pliny the Younger, Pompeii's most famous survivor, wrote, "There had been tremors for many days previously, a common occurrence in Campania and no cause for panic. But that night the shaking grew much stronger; people thought it was an earthquake, not just a tremor." Which might sound an awful lot like the hours before the levees broke in New Orleans.

Ironically, it was Roman regulation that the dead could not be buried within a city's walls. Yet, now Pompeii is one of the most famous tombs in the world.

In an intensely haunting display, "body casts" of vicitms who were caught in the volcano's final pyroclastic surge (a blast of poisonous gas and hot rock) lie in the back of the exhibit, in a sparse but well-lit room. In 1860, archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli was the first to fill in cavities left inside the hardened ash by long-decomposed bodies, resulting in stunningly detailed, ghost-like impressions of people and animals' last moments. In fact, while most of my fellow journalists roamed around the other sections enthusiastically snapping photos of just about everything, it was here that the shutter clicks stopped.

They're visions that stick with you: A man, who would have been either a criminal or a slave, was chained to his post at the ankle, and stretches futilely toward freedom; a dog twists around on its back; people huddle together; fists are clenched at the mouth to avoid suffocation.

Closer to Naples, the inhabitants of Herculaneum suffered a gruesome fate, too, where the red pyroclastic flows incinerated at least 300 people who were waiting on the beach for rescue boats that never arrived. The exhibit gives us a cast of 32 skeletal remains, nine of them children — recovered from the shores of Herculaneum.

I was curious what the "family" version of the audio tour guide, available at the exhibit entrance, would have to say in the body cast section. And here it explains, gently, that "these are not real bodies" and that they're "made of plaster of Paris, the same material a doctor uses to make a cast." But real body or no, it is still rather chilling.

It is this mix of the beautiful and the macabre that made the Pompeiian ruins destined as a tourist attraction. Soon after they were accidentally uncovered in the early 18th century, the site became a stop along the "grand tour" of Europe, for wealthy and/or educated visitors — one of whom was Mark Twain, in 1867.

At one point in the Museum of Science exhibit, we get to see Pompeiian graffiti, which usually involved the same kinds of messages — "so-and-so loves so-and-so" or "this restaurant sucks" — only their messages were carved out permanently in stone. This difference in legacy occurred to Twain, writing, "What would a volcano leave of an American city, if it once rained its cinders upon it? Hardly a sign or a symbol to tell its story."

This question becomes all the more palpable when you're funneled into the Museum of Science gift shop on your way out, bombarded by cheesy, Pompeii-themed swag — bags of colorful pasta, pop-up books and mini volcanos, a T-shirt that reads (in sports jersey style) "79 A.D."